writing about nurses Archives

‘Goodbye Cherry Ames’ – On Whether Nurses Change the World

For a moment of respite from the beeps and buzzes, I walked back to the stillness of my office, wondering how I’d ever questioned the reason for the toughness and practicality of the nurses when I first came here. How could they be otherwise and survive?

But it wasn’t even 15 minutes later that a nurse about my age stood in my doorway and proudly introduced her college-age son. “Kids today have great opportunities,” she said. “He wants to change the world.” Then she looked away and said, “Me, I just do a job.”

I looked at her in disbelief. “You really feel you aren’t changing the world too, the world of these patients? People who come here with a chronic disease—who could view it as a life sentence? Don’t you realize that you help them know they can actually live with it, resume their lives, move ahead?”

She listened, but seemed unconvinced. Her eyes shining, she replied, “It’s me who learns from them, who’s come to realize that if I’m ever in a situation like theirs, I can go on.”

That’s an excerpt from “Goodbye Cherry Ames,” the Reflections essay in the November issue of AJN. It’s by a social worker who planned to become a nurse. Click through (the PDF version is best), read the short essay, and (if you’re feeling inspired) let us know in the comments below what you would have told that discouraged nurse.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:15:05-05:00November 2nd, 2010|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment

October Poem: An Emergency Nurse’s “Purgatory”—and Sanctuary

In “Purgatory,” poet and ED nurse Stacy R. Nigliazzo writes about the sick and the stranded as they wait their turns at a hospital Emergency entrance—and the “nurse behind the bulletproof glass” who summons each in turn, her raw voice “calling sanctuary.” Read the poem here; listen to the poet’s reading here.

If this piques your curiosity, take a look at previous issues (Art of Nursing is always free; you might need to access page 2 or 3 of an issue’s table of contents to find it). To hear more poems read by their authors, click here. Interested in submitting your own work to Art of Nursing? Read this blog post for details. Guidelines can be found here; and if you still have questions, feel free to write to the Art of Nursing coordinator (me) at sylvia.foley@wolterskluwer.com.

Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:21:45-05:00October 14th, 2009|nursing perspective|0 Comments

‘I Can Still See the Fear in Her Eyes’: An ICU Nurse Faces a Surprising Reversal of Roles

I can't remember her name, but I can still see her face and the fear in her eyes—and in the eyes of her family every time her cough triggered the alarm or she grimaced in obvious respiratory distress. She was on the ventilator—and much too young to be dying of breast cancer.

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:21:48-05:00October 9th, 2009|nursing perspective|0 Comments

“The nurse left work at five o’clock. . . .”: Three-Minute Fiction at NPR

By James M. Stubenrauch, senior editor

Here’s something AJN’s readers might be interested in: National Public Radio has been running a short-short fiction contest—stories that can be read aloud in three minutes or less—and posting some of the better ones on its Web site, here. In Round Two of the contest, there was one extra rule that writers had to observe: the story had to begin with the sentence “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” The winner will be selected by James Wood, book critic at The New Yorker, any day now.

I especially enjoyed “Working Hours” by Natalie Miller, which begins: “The nurse left work at five o’clock. My heart stopped beating at 5:01.” It’s wildly inventive writing, but I wonder, would this situation occur in hospitals today?

Also, there are some excellent stories that have nothing to do with nursing among the Round One entries (and, by the way, I notice some people have made use of the comments section to post their own short-short stories—hmmm). Happy quick-quick reading!